The straight dope on Italian health and medical care, from an American woman doctor who lives and works in Rome. Her memoir, Dottoressa, will be published in May 2019.

Monday, December 4, 2017

In The Beginning: New York To Rome By Way Of Africa

November 1978, eleven at night, five
weeks after my then-husband and I had left New York for good, just inside
Tanzania. The two soldiers who stopped our truck were so drunk they barely
managed to keep their bayonets pointing in our direction. Andrea and I, about
to close our six-week African parenthesis before settling in Italy, obediently climbed
down to be escorted at riflepoint to the tent of an equally sloshed camp
commander, who dressed us down and ordered the protesting driver to haul us
back to Kenya. An abrupt closing of the Tanzanian border, due to fighting near
Uganda, had dashed our dreams of watching lions stalk wildebeest at Ngorongoro
Crater and smelling the cloves in Zanzibar. Public busses between the two
countries had been halted, railway lines had never existed, Andrea’s awkward stab at bribing a ship’s captain had
fizzled, and our final attempt to cross the border, by hitchhiking, had now met
the same fate. The trucker fumed all the way back across 10 miles of
no-man’s-land and dumped us at the Kenyan border station.

There were two benches outside, narrow, wooden, and painful, where we
got snatches of sleep until a workingman’s bus stopped at dawn, en route
to Mombasa, and picked us up. In my dreams that night I said farewell to my
American life. That dusty nowhere in Africa seemed to straddle not just the
edge between two countries but a watershed between my old world and my new one.
Perhaps it was facing those bayonets as a couple that hammered it home: I
really had thrown in my lot with my Italian husband and with the unknown. When
our plane took off from Nairobi a week later, I was ready to leave all
certainties behind and begin a joyful adventure in chaos.

Chaos aplenty awaited us, joy zero.
The Rome we touched down in was bewilderingly dark, depressed, menacing, with
none of the raucous street life that had seduced me as a tourist a few years
back. Just months earlier former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro had been
kidnapped by the leftist terrorists of the Red Brigades. When he was murdered
and his body dumped two blocks from his Christian Democratic party’s headquarters,
it made headlines around the world.

The oil crisis was at its peak,
forcing restaurants to close at 9 pm when in normal times people would have
just been sitting down to eat. Trigger-happy cops manned the intersections, and
the few pedestrians scurried like rats from doorway to doorway. My personal
gloom deepened when I learned my Italian medical license wasn’t there waiting
for me, as a nice but ignorant lady in the New York Consulate had promised.

Fortunately everything came right in
the end. Yes, the license took a year and a half to come through, but by 1981
Rome had regained its bustle and I had launched a medical practice that would
with time become the envy of my American colleagues. I’ve gotten to play the
old-fashioned country doc for decades, treating three and four generations in
the same family, while enjoying a clientele – one-third American, one-third
Italian, one-third miscellany – that’s included Kenyan diplomats, English
nannies, Burmese nuns, Italian auto mechanics, and Nobel laureate poet Joseph
Brodsky. I have the world’s best medical secretary. I practice blissfully free
from the diagnostic coding and insurance company pre-authorizations and
electronic medical record regulations that torture
physicians in the US, and I can choose for myself which medical guidelines
to follow and which to ignore. OK, I haven’t had the peace of mind that comes
from top-notch hospital backup, or accumulated a fat investment portfolio like
my colleagues back home, but between the professional plusses and the glorious
Italian lifestyle I wouldn’t exchange my Roman career for any other.

2 comments:

Not only is your writing style genuinely beautiful, Susan, which already draws me in, but your personal story is really engaging and rather exotic. Furthermore, I would agree that you have the best medical secretary in the world!

About Me

I moved to Rome in 1978 after finishing my training in New York, and have been practicing primary care internal medicine there ever since, treating a clientele that’s featured Roman auto mechanics and British ambassadors, Indonesian art restorers and Filipina maids, Russian poets and Ethiopian priests. When not seeing patients, doing research in psychosomatic medicine, or being the Artist's Wife to my composer husband, I've written a book about my medical adventures, Dottoressa: An American Doctor In Rome, to be published by Paul Dry Books in May 2019.